# Kaoru Nakano **Domain:** Neural Networks / Associative Memory / Hardware **Doc Type:** Person Node **Maturity:** Historical ## Definition **Kaoru Nakano** was a Japanese researcher whose Associatron modeled distributed associative memory in simulation and hardware. ## Technical Context Nakano stored entities as distributed bit patterns and reconstructed a whole pattern from a fragment. Before the 1972 journal paper, he reported a 180-neuron simulation and a 25-neuron hardware realization. ## Sources / Provenance - Kaoru Nakano, “Associatron — A Model of Associative Memory,” 1972. - [[articles/Modern Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s|Modern Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s]]. ## See Also [[wiki/Associative Memory|Associative Memory]], [[wiki/Connectionism|Connectionism]]